Rough Draft Thinking 💭
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Hello Reader, You don’t have to get an A+ in marketing. In all the years I’ve done this work, one of the recurring themes (and I’ve certainly been guilty of it as well) is that people believe they need to do everything perfectly. This is especially true when we’ve got a lot of high achievers that are accustomed to excelling at everything they do. This is how that A+ thinking can become a spiral that leads to inaction. Does this sound familiar? "I can’t do SEO if I can't do everything exactly right." "I can’t start a podcast unless I have every episode planned and every guest booked." "I can’t launch that YouTube channel until I’ve hired amazing video editor to make your YouTube videos look like those I see from the fancy influencer channels." The list goes on. People want to have a fabulous marketing funnel. They want to have perfect branding. They wanna have perfect, typo free copy. They want their newsletters to sound like they’re out of the Atlantic. Like I said, I get it. You’re excellent at your work and you want to put the best foot forward. Instead of putting the best foot forward, you put no feet forward. This is why I love the concept of rough draft thinking. A rough draft is actually a decent first version of your work. It's a full concept, even if there are details that need to be ironed out. It has a beginning, middle, and end. That's pretty great! Sometimes I talk about this as minimum viable product, but I think "rough draft" is actually much better phrasing and it beautifully implies iteration and improvement over time. One of the things I've committed to this year is more rough draft thinking so I can get more great ideas (some of my ideas are awesome!) out into the world in their imperfect, drafty state. In marketing, this can look like testing concepts with a friendly audience, like a community or newsletter subscribers. It can mean publishing that blog post that's 600 words and without the beautiful graphics you envisioned. It can mean turning on your webcam and recording your YouTube videos even if you don't have the lighting nailed down. Ready to ditch the A+ mindset and embrace rough draft thinking? In this coming week, pick one marketing project—a small, doable one—you've been putting off and give it the rough draft treatment. Start small, test it out, and see what happens. You might be surprised by the results (and how much less stressful it is!). Talk soon, Sarah
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